SIX-YEAR-OLD Marko Susnja has never seen his father, and probably never
will.

Marko is one of dozens of children born in East Timor to impoverished
Timorese women who have been abandoned by their United Nations-employed
fathers.

"Please help me. I have no money to provide for my son,"
pleads Marko's mother, Lily Nheu, 31.

Three years ago, Lily wrote to the UN mission in Dili, asking for help
to force her child's Bosnian father, Goran Susnja, to pay paternity
support.

"I implore you to help me write an official letter to Goran
requesting him to provide child support for my son, which I am legally
entitled to by law," Ms Nheu wrote.

She received no reply.

But this week, after The Age submitted a series of questions about her
plight to the UN, Ms Nheu received some good news.

Gyorgy Kakuk, the UN's spokesman in Dili, said the UN was now looking
into her case.

He said the UN had a policy of tracking down employees who father
children with local women while deployed in a foreign country, in order to
assist the mothers in any civil claim.

The UN, though, has done nothing to trace more than 20 other UN
personnel who have abandoned babies they have fathered in East Timor,
leaving women to bring up the children without financial support.

Welfare workers say the women have been stigmatised, and in some cases
ostracised, by their communities.

For years the UN tried to cover up perverted and outrageous behaviour
by some of their 20,000 uniformed and civilian personnel who have served
in East Timor since 1999.

This included the sexual abuse of children, bestiality and coercing
women and children into prostitution.

When some UN staff resigned in 2006 after a report revealing a culture
that covered up perverse behaviour in East Timor, the UN mission in Dili
enforced a "zero tolerance" policy towards sexual exploitation
by its employees.

Several staff were employed to enforce the policy, which resulted in
the closure of several brothels in Dili.

But for more than three years the UN did nothing to help Ms Nheu, who
has struggled to find work so she could care for her son, who is supposed
to start school in July.

She travelled overland from the isolated East Timorese enclave of
Oecussi to Dili this week, seeking advice from friends on how she could
pressure the UN to force Mr Susnja to provide for his son.

He arrived in the isolated enclave in 2001, where Ms Nheu grew up, a
good-looking UN civilian policeman earning more than $100,000 a year.

Some of the worst abuses by UN personnel occurred around that time in
the enclave.

The UN has admitted ­ but no prosecutions were ever launched ­ that
one of its employees from an unnamed country sexually abused two boys and
two girls there.

In early 2001, two Jordanian soldiers were evacuated from the enclave
with injured penises after attempting sexual intercourse with goats.

Ms Nheu told the UN in her letter that "Goran and I fell in love
in October 2001, and we officially married in the Catholic church on 14
June 2002".

A few weeks after the marriage, the couple travelled to Bosnia, where
Ms Nheu became pregnant.

She says she was happy and well treated at first and returned to
Oecussi to be with her family for the birth.

Mr Susnja was redeployed by the UN to Liberia.

"When I left Bosnia, Goran promised to take his responsibility as
a husband and father to my son seriously, saying that he will come back to
Timor after his mission," Ms Nheu says. But he told her in March 2006
"that he has no intention of coming back here, nor interested in
seeing his son".

Ms Nheu told the UN that "I am a single mother and it is difficult
for me to raise my son alone. I want his father to be responsible, even if
it means taking him to court."

Mr Kakuk said that serious disciplinary measures were in place for
sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel, and they did have paternity
obligations under UN regulations.

He could not comment on specific cases such as Ms Nheu's, or explain
why the letter she sent to the UN in 2006 went unanswered.